Build descending same-suit runs across ten columns and clear all eight King-to-Ace sequences to win.
Cards are dealt into ten columns. Move cards onto a card one rank higher to build downward sequences. A group of cards only lifts together if it forms a same-suit run going down. Whenever you complete a full King-to-Ace run in a single suit, it is removed from the table. Clear all eight runs to win.
Spider dates to 1949, which makes it recent by the standards of patience, and its name is a straightforward piece of arithmetic: a spider has eight legs, and the game has eight foundations to fill.
It is a two-deck game, and that is what gives it its character. Fifty-four cards go to the tableau in ten piles, and the remaining fifty come down ten at a time — but only when no pile is empty, which turns an empty column from a convenience into something you must spend carefully.
Because in-suit runs move together while mixed ones do not, the whole game is about untangling suits that were dealt interleaved. The one-suit and two-suit versions most players start with are later simplifications of exactly that difficulty.
Spider solitaire is a traditional single-player card game of patient sequence-building across ten columns. This is an original, free browser version with one-, two-, and four-suit play, a daily deal, and unlimited undo, no download or sign-up required.